Thinking 101: How to Reason Better to Live Better

by Woo-Kyoung Ahn

But even without the explicit instructions, participants reported significantly less negative emotions compared to another group of participants who hadn’t distanced themselves from the negative experience during the first session. Once they’d seen the situation differently by distancing themselves, it was as if that new representation had stayed with them.

The perception of causality is an illusion.

Once you stop obsessing about why certain things happened, especially things you wish hadn’t, then you can take a more distant view, which might help free you from negative emotions like

remorse and regret, and also perhaps allow you to engage in more constructive problem-solving the next time you encounter a tricky situation.

Concrete examples are much more powerful than abstract descriptions, and they stick to our minds so much better.

Some researchers have argued that it is because our minds are built to think in terms of what we experience and perceive rather than abstract concepts.

Why are we swayed less by abstract statistics than examples of specific cases?

The main reason we’re not convinced by statistics is that most

of us do not fully understand them.

“What the hell is going on with Global Waming [sic]?” Stephen Colbert had the perfect response: “Global warming isn’t real because I was cold today! Also, great news: World hunger is over because I just ate.

The results showed that the anecdotal comments had affected

participants’ choices much more than the mean course evaluation ratings, which were based on many more students’ experiences.

learning about the absurdity of the identifiable victim effect did not make people more influenceable by larger data.

known as regression toward the mean.

On top of all these random factors that can work for or against candidates, the inherent problem with interviews or auditions is that interviewers observe only a thin slice of the person’s performance. Making hiring decisions based primarily on interviews is a violation of—now we can use a technical term!—the law of large numbers.

Because there are always random factors in the world, if you apply for as many jobs as possible, those random factors are more likely to cancel each other out, increasing your chance to land a job where your true skills and experiences will be appreciated.

Probabilistically speaking, however, ethnic profiling is not justified at all. To fully understand why that is, we need to understand some basic concepts in probability theory—specifically, Bayes’ theorem.

This means that the difficulty does not lie in applying a known solution to a new problem, but in spontaneously retrieving it from memory.

That is bad news, because it means that four minutes after a teacher explains a method to students, the students won’t be able to apply it to a new situation without an explicit reminder from someone else to do so.

But, people give more weight to negative behavior, so your overall impression of John is likely to be more negative than neutral.

People who tasted “75 percent lean” ground beef rated their hamburgers to be less greasy, more lean, and better in quality and taste than the people who’d eaten ground beef that was “25 percent fat.

But Kahneman and Tversky claimed that $100 feels different to us when we gain it versus when we lose

but it feels more threatening if we might lose the gain than if we never had it in the first place.

People simply hate to lose what they own, even when they owned it for only a brief moment.

their selling price was significantly higher in the endowment condition than in the no endowment condition. But those who took the acetaminophen did not; their selling price was statistically no different whether they were endowed with the mug or not. It would be amusing if Tylenol added this warning to its list of side effects: “Acetaminophen may cause you to ignore losses and sell your possessions at a lower price than usual.

Babies who slept with a light on in their rooms were five times more likely to become nearsighted than those who slept in the dark, the study said. It received quite a bit

attention in the mass media. As CNN summarized it, “Even low levels of light can penetrate the eyelids during sleep, keeping the eyes working when they should be at rest.

Fine, but then why did I grow up thinking they were yellow?

Having a biased interpretation of reality because of what we already believe is extremely common.

SMART PEOPLE CAN BE MORE BIASED Are some people less susceptible to bias? How about those who are typically considered smart?

In fact, smarter people can be even more prone to biased interpretations, because they know more ways to explain away the facts that contradict their beliefs.

factors. Consider the traffic light again. I had no vested interest in believing the middle light to be yellow. I have strong opinions about many issues, but the color of traffic lights isn’t one of them. Despite that, I’ve been wrongly seeing those lights as yellow since I was a child, simply because I believed them to be that color.

Thinking biases are that much harder to overcome when we believe that we don’t commit them, and that they only plague dense people who aren’t like us at all.

Cognitive behavioral therapy has been shown to be highly effective, but like getting into shape with the help of a personal trainer or a yoga instructor, it does not work like a magic wand in a single session; it takes weeks and weeks of therapy sessions, and one has to also repeatedly exercise the skills in everyday life—another example of how challenging it is to counteract biased interpretations.

Let’s switch gears. What are we

to do when we are inconvenienced or burdened by someone else’s bi...

This is why we sometimes need policies and regulations at the systemic level. For instance, it is enormously challenging to convince someone to get a COVID vaccine if they believe that the vaccines are harmful. My friend’s friend’s friend has a Ph.D. in biology and an elaborate and totally false theory about how mRNA COVID vaccines permanently damage our genes.

Furthermore, many of those prejudices have systemic origins, caused by our history, culture, economics, and politics. System-level changes also come with their own challenges. For one, there is a recursive problem that these decisions are to be made by people who are also prone to biased interpretations.

A lot of biased or ineffective practices are this way.

Each couple was presented with four glasses, labeled A, B, C, and D, that had been filled with different varieties of red wine. One person in each couple was told to taste them and write down descriptions of their tastes on four index cards. The descriptions were to be just that, descriptions, and there was no indication on the card whether they applied to wine A, B, C, or D.

The messages’ recipients were also fairly confident about their judgments. Yet when the scores were tallied, their accuracy was merely at a chance level, that is, 50–50, no different than flipping a coin.

are many utterances that we use that are quite ambiguous when you think about them, such as “Please leave me alone.” This can mean “I’m busy,” or alternatively, “I’m mad at you.” A simple question like “How’s the salad?” could mean “Isn’t the salad terrible?” or “Why aren’t you saying anything nice about the salad I made?” Or, you could be literally asking how good or bad the salad is. And unlike with sarcasm, there really isn’t an agreed-upon intonation for each of those different meanings. In the study,

I love this chapter. Linguistics!

That is, even after fourteen years of marriage, your spouse may misunderstand your tone of voice, and hence the meaning of your potentially ambiguous sentences, as much as half of the time.

A good lesson in being direct

If readers have heard the term “theory of mind,” this is what it refers to: reasoning about what’s in other people’s minds.

This is a good lesson for writers because we often assume incorrectly what will go through a readers mind when reading our work.

curse of knowledge: once you know something, you have trouble fully taking the perspective of someone who doesn’t know it, even if you are an adult.

In fact, smart people who know a lot are not necessarily good teachers or coaches, partly because of the curse of knowledge.

They would rather be friends with someone wearing a generic watch than a Rolex, a Walmart T-shirt than a Saks Fifth Avenue one, or someone driving a VW Golf as opposed to a BMW.

During the pandemic, almost all South Koreans followed the government’s orders to wear masks and close their businesses.

That level of social conformity would be

unimaginable in an individualistic society like the United States. To fit into these collectivist

members have to be constantly aware of what others are thinking and how others think about themselves. The socialization that is required to conform to these norms begins at a very early age. Perhaps as a result of this constant training to read others’ minds, people from collectivist societies become so proficient at taking others’ perspectives that it is almost reflexive. WHAT

I want to live in a collectivist society.